Knights of the Black and White (13 page)

Count Hugh knew from the outset that he himself could not ride out to the Pope’s war that year, simply because of the pressure of his own duties in Champagne, where he had not only recently married but also launched an ambitious program of improvements to his county, and so he instructed Sir Hugh de Payens and his fellow brethren in the Order, along with all the other, ordinary men from his County of Champagne who wished to ride to the Pope’s Holy War, to prepare for their time away from home, commanding them to attend to their various responsibilities, to set their houses in order and arrange their marital and domestic affairs with care before leaving.

Then, at the appointed time, in October 1096, he dispatched a battle-ready expeditionary force to join the army commanded by Raymond, the veteran Count of 110

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Toulouse and Count Hugh’s own sponsor and superior in the Order of Rebirth. Hugh de Payens and his two friends, the latter having acquired reluctant but dutiful permission from their wives, were proud to ride with Count Raymond, and Arlo rode with them, claiming that right as Hugh’s lifelong personal attendant and bodyguard. All three of the triumvirate were happy that he had done so, for as Arlo himself remarked, had he not elected to go with them, the three of them alone would have been easy prey for the vultures within the army. Besides which, none of them had the slightest knowledge of how to cook, and they would doubtless have starved to death in the midst of plenty.

From Toulouse, they marched southeastward to the Dalmatian coast and the port of Dyrrachium, where they took ship across the Adriatic Sea and then marched through Thessalonica towards Constantinople. They arrived in April 1097, as one of the four great armies from Christendom that arrived in the Byzantine capital that year, to be welcomed warmly by the Emperor Alexius, whose territories and possessions had been ravaged by the Turks in recent years and who was now ecstatic over his fortunate friendship with Pope Urban.

After remaining in Constantinople for only a short space of time, they were ushered across the Hellespont by Alexius’s people into Turkey, where the four armies assembled into one great force, and Hugh and his two friends found themselves highly impressed to be part of a remarkably well-ordered army of forty-three hundred knights and thirty thousand infantry that struck out on Beginnings

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foot shortly thereafter to cross Turkey and strike at the Muslim principalities of Syria, Lebanon, and Israel itself.

Everything went according to plan. They captured Nicea and Edessa, then won a great battle at Dorylaeum, and after that they marched across the brutalizing Ana-tolian desert to besiege the enormous city of Antioch.

That episode provided an object lesson in humility for all of them, and the three friends took note of how their expectations had been proved to be ludicrous.

They had all heard of Antioch, a fabulous city in the mystical East, and they approached it expecting to find a biblical land flowing with milk and honey. Instead they found an overcrowded entrapment, a cesspool of filth and starvation that had been in the grip of brutal famine for years, and where inhuman conditions were made unbearable by chronic foul weather. From his first glimpse of the city, Hugh had known that the Frankish army could not hope to encircle it. It covered three square miles and was protected by high, thick walls, fortified by four hundred and fifty towers. Behind the city proper, but still within its walls, rose Mount Silpius, crowned with a citadel a thousand feet above the plains where Hugh and his fellows sat. Almost six thousand men and knights died of hunger during the eight months they spent outside Antioch’s walls.

“Six thousand men … Six
thousand
…” The awe in Montdidier’s voice reflected the stunned expressions on the faces of the others who sat beside him, staring into the fire they had built against the chill of the desert night. The fuel was smashed furniture, looted from an abandoned 112

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house in the city, and now they sat in front of it as if unwilling to look at one another, their minds occupied with the tidings they had just heard. Montdidier spoke again, looking this time at St. Omer, who had brought the word to them.

“Are you sure, Goff ? Six thousand,
starved
to death?

Impossible! How many were we, leaving Constantinople?”

It was Hugh who answered, glancing at St. Omer for confirmation, “More than thirty-five thousand, as I recall. So we have lost one man in six, providing that Goff’s number is sound. Where did you hear it, Goff ?”

“From Pepin, not half an hour ago. He said the commanders of the four armies ordered a census to be conducted shortly after the city fell. We all knew something of the kind was going on, because I remember we were together when the priests came by several days ago, asking all those questions about who among us had died, and how. Well, now we know why they were asking. The results were reported to Raymond of Toulouse today.

Pepin had just heard the tidings before I met him, and he told them to me: six thousand men dead, some of the pestilence, but most of starvation. Now we have less than thirteen hundred knights remaining, and most of those have no horses.”

“Not all of those starved, Goff, nor did the infantry.

Those numbers tally total deaths, but we had heavy losses among our forces long before we came to Antioch. We lost too many men on the way here, before we learned to respect our enemies properly. We should have learned that lesson much sooner than we did.”

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“Aye, but still, Hugh,
six thousand
is a mass of dead men.”

Hugh was suddenly impatient with Godfrey’s awe.

“Aye, it is,” he snapped. “But there is nothing we can do to change that and we have little to gain from fretting over it. At least none of us is numbered among the dead.

So we must simply shrug our shoulders, adjust to the loss of those six thousand and continue without them.”

Neither of his friends responded, and Hugh hunched forward, staring into the flames, thinking that he had made more adjustments in the previous few months than he had in all the twenty-six years of his life before then.

The siege of Antioch had forced him to confront his own mortality and to think about things that had never occurred to him before. Before reaching Antioch, what little philosophy he had pursued had all had to do with the Order of Rebirth, its requirements and its tenets. In front of this city’s towering walls, however, he had been forced to realign his priorities and to re-examine his life, seeing it for the first time as what it really was—the life of an ordinary, mortal, and all too vulnerable man, prey, like all other men, to fears and doubts, to illness, and to death from starvation and the dangers of drinking filthy waters.

The famine that he and his fellows had found when they reached Antioch was something entirely new to all of them.

They had all heard of famine, he mused now, and had thought they knew what it was; they had all paid it lip service at one time or another, speaking of it in hushed tones and associating it with extraordinarily hard times.

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None of them, however, from the highest lord to the most base-born camp follower in the army, was equipped to imagine, or to deal with, the reality of a long-established famine that had resulted in the total absence of food of any kind over vast areas of land. The Franks, born and bred in green, lush lands, could not begin to imagine an absence of grass, and the first lesson they had to learn about that was that their beasts, deprived of fodder, died quickly. Thus they ended up eating their own livestock, aware that once the animals were all gone, they would have nothing else to eat—and the animals were dying in large numbers, which meant that most of their dead flesh was going to waste in the desert heat.

In addition to the famine afflicting the land, they had found the weather there on the plains of Antioch to be foul beyond belief, alternating freezing temperatures with high winds that stirred up suffocating sandstorms, and long periods of high humidity that brought insects out by the millions and increased the intolerable discomforts facing the so-called besiegers, who were all by now aware of the ludicrous futility of what they were attempting.

Sickness had broken out quickly among the starving Frankish army, and once it did, it spread with terrifying speed. No one knew what to call the pestilence, and the few physicians among the Franks were powerless against it. When the scourge was at its height, Hugh, Godfrey, and Payn had all come down with it at the same time, leaving Arlo, who for some reason remained unscathed, to look after all of them. Godfrey had recovered quickly, back on his feet within a matter of days. Hugh had taken Beginnings

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four days longer and recovered more slowly, but soon he, too, was strengthening noticeably. Montdidier, however, hovered close to death for more than fifteen days, and three times Arlo thought he had died, so still and motionless was he, his breathing imperceptible. But on each occasion Payn rallied and snatched another ragged breath, and on the eleventh night his fever broke. He had lost almost one quarter of his body weight by then, but once he began to grow stronger, his recovery was as rapid as the others’ had been.

They had all survived, Hugh knew, because Arlo had somehow managed to acquire a sack of whole grain—half full and obviously stolen—and he guarded it jealously, grinding it in small portions, by hand, between two stones. He offered no explanation of where it had come from and no one asked him for one, all of them too grateful for the bounty contained in that simple jute bag and the bland but wholesome porridge it provided.

After eight months and a single day of siege, Antioch had collapsed in the course of one night, on the third of June, and it had fallen not through conquest but through corruption and treachery, when one of the tower guards, in exchange for a fortune in bribes, opened the water gate to Frankish infiltrators. By dawn more than five hundred Franks were inside the city, and the sound of their massed trumpets within the walls caused panic. The Muslim governor of the city fled through the rear gates with most of his army. Hugh was thinking of precisely that when Godfrey brought the matter up.

“I had a long talk with Pepin,” he said. “He had just 116

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come off duty and was waiting for one of his friends to join him. I was surprised by what he had to say about our capturing the city.”

Hugh smirked. “
Pepin
had
thoughts
?”

St. Omer shrugged in mock apology. “Well, you know what I mean … the Count had thoughts. Pepin chanced to overhear them.”

“So what did he say that surprised you?”

St. Omer wrinkled his nose. “He said that if the emir in charge of the city had rallied his men and stood his ground, we would not have stood a chance of taking the city, even though we were already inside.”

“Hmm. He is probably correct. We barely had five hundred men inside, and they were tightly confined in one closed area. There were thousands of defenders in there who could have eaten us alive had they reacted differently. Did Pepin say anything about when we might be moving on, away from this hellhole?”

“I asked him that, but all he would say was that it won’t be tomorrow or the day after. I think he was really saying that we might be here for a long time, regrouping and gathering our strength.”

Hugh merely nodded at that, unsurprised, and returned to his musing. The six thousand deaths were now lodged in his mind, and he began to wonder about the numbers of men who had already died on both sides without a single Frankish warrior having yet set eyes upon Jerusalem. And as that thought came to him, he remembered his godfather St. Clair’s suggestion, on the evening of his Raising, that the best thing that the new Beginnings

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Pope, Urban II, might do to solve the problem of the knights of Christendom and their ungovernable behavior would be to foment a war. Hugh found himself recalling how Sir Stephen had talked that night about speaking to the Pope concerning the idea because, as St. Clair had observed, Christendom was not all the world and not all the world was Christendom. Now that it had come unbidden to his attention, Hugh found the inference un-avoidable, and he was surprised that the connection had not occurred to him before, because Sir Stephen St. Clair said nothing lightly. He was highly placed within the Order’s hierarchy, and he had both the power and the influence to win the Pope’s ear, and the intellect and charm to make his ideas appear attractive to the pontiff.

There was no denying that Pope Urban’s emotional call to arms had solved his most chronic and pressing problem—and relieved his embarrassment—more efficiently than anyone could have imagined beforehand, by providing Christian knights everywhere with an opportunity to fight in a glorious cause on the far side of the world, and to achieve salvation in a Holy War against the enemies of their Christian God. The Pope had turned an idea into reality, and in so doing had created a ravening monster with a blood lust that threatened to consume everyone exposed to it.

In spite of knowing that he might never know the truth, Hugh became increasingly certain that his godfather had, in fact, planted the seed in Pope Urban’s mind, and he found the knowledge that he himself, Hugh de Payens, had conceived the original idea to be both 118

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appalling and pleasing. Appalling because of the catastro-phe that the idea had loosed upon the world and the cat-aclysmic loss of life on all sides, little of it yet having anything to do with real warfare, and pleasing because he had been instrumental in furthering the objectives of the Order of Rebirth.

Suddenly uncomfortable with what was in his mind, he stood up and looked about him, sensing the dark bulk of the city’s walls at his back and aware that his friends were watching him curiously. He kept his face expressionless and bade them good night, then made his way to his bedroll, trying to convince himself as he went that he was not being cynical. He knew he had much to be cynical about, witnessing daily the atrocious behavior of the people around him, the so-called Armies of God and their illustrious leaders. It was plain to anyone who had eyes that there was more fighting for personal gain going on here among the powerful men in Outremer than there was fighting for the glory of God and His Holy Places, for they had not yet even begun to approach the Holy Places, and Hugh feared that he might not be able to conceal his distaste for his fellow travelers for much longer if their behavior did not improve. It would be many more months yet, however, before Hugh de Payens could will himself to acknowledge that the heathens against whom they were fighting were, in many ways, more Christian and more admirable than were their Cross-wearing adversaries, for whom the shouted phrase “Deus le veult!” had grown to mean
I
want that!